ANALYSIS:A document which is deleted may still exist elsewhere on the web
A FAMOUS New Yorkercartoon from 1993 proclaimed that "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog".
Less than 20 years later everybody on the internet can find out whether your friends, neighbours, customers or competitors think you are a dog – and it is increasingly difficult to erase or correct those online opinions.
This year is rapidly shaping up to be the one when citizens’ expectations of internet privacy collide with the commercial plans of internet companies.
Already in 2012 a number of legal actions have been taken by parties looking to remove comments or video posted online and who claim to be innocent of the actions they are accused of.
While the courts have proven sympathetic to the victims of online accusations, the technical challenge of removing something that has been posted online is another matter entirely.
Search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing have software programs called “spiders” which trawl the web and record everything they find. This ensures that even if a court orders a document to be removed it may continue to exist on the servers of another company.
For example, with Google cache, a feature offered in the search results it produces, it is a relatively trivial matter to find the data that was on a page which has since been deleted.
Internet giants such as Google, Facebook and Twitter retain large amounts of data on people who use their services. This data allows them to serve personalised advertising to their users and is central to their business model.
Google has attracted criticism in the past week as it moves to a single privacy policy for all its services. Critics claim this means private information included in an email from its Gmail service could be used to display ads when you use its search engine.
Facebook has also been asked to make changes to the way it handles user information following an investigation by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
The European Commission seems to be in tune with European citizens with its proposals on data protection announced last week.
It suggests internet companies will have to be far more open and explicit about the kind of information on users they are storing, and about how they intend to use it. It also proposes a sweeping “right to be forgotten” which would require social networks and other sites to delete all personal data on a user.
Last night the Rate-Your-Solicitor.comsite had gone offline. But that doesn't mean the accusations made on it are not sitting on various computers around the internet.